Old-home week at the Big M

Twenty-seven part-timers and six full-timers keep the Big M in Holcomb Hills Plaza humming year-round, but the payroll rises a bit just before Christmas.

Morgan Wesson, correspondent

Twenty-seven part-timers and six full-timers keep the Big M in Holcomb Hills Plaza humming year-round, but the payroll rises a bit just before Christmas.

That’s when college kids who spent their high school years staffing the register or stocking shelves call manager Cassie Sydow with the same question:
“They contact me in November on e-mail or they call and say, ‘I’m home for Christmas. You got any hours?’” said Sydow.

And she does. Big M always makes room for its graduates.

The holiday veterans are a lifesaver for Sydow, who gets to see her fifth-grader, Ben, play basketball for a change and spend more time with her younger son.

“I can be with my kids,” said Sydow, thanks to returning college kids covering for her.
“Cassie is a very nice boss. She’s very flexible,” said 18-year-old Rachel Repard, home in Bloomfield on holiday break from Buffalo State, where she majors in hospitality administration.

The first summer Repard worked anywhere it was for Cassie Sydow, years ago.
“I had soccer. She scheduled me around that. Now I’ve got an internship at the Rose Corner Bakery in Canandaigua and she’s scheduling me around that,” said Repard, who dropped right back into the Big M routine. “It’s kind of funny seeing all the different personalities. There are regulars, and we get to know them.”

Repard is one of six college kids who will come back for a few weeks to spend time with what has become an extended family. Sydow is the daughter of owners Skip and Donna Delf, who opened the market in 1981.

The Delfs are into their second generation of workers from the same area families. They are hiring the grown children of their oldest former part-timers now, including Emily Pratt, Susan Rogers Pratt’s daughter. Emily schedules Big M work around her high school sport.

“Emily was Bowler of the Year two years in a row,” said a proud Skip Delf.
Sydow may be keeping an eye out for the third generation. When any former part-timer who lives nearby has a new baby, Sydow wants to know.

“She makes sure they bring them in or she’ll go see them,” said Skip Delf.
Big M alumni include artist Melissa Morley, currently at school in Chicago.
“If she’s home, she stops in and sees us,” said Skip Delf.

The list goes on.

“There are tons of them,” said Cassie Sydow, including a Big M full-timer who started as a part-timer in 1986, Gerry Rogers.

When the Delfs can’t remember the name of a part-timer, Gerry has it.

Mike Bettini, 17, may be among next year’s holiday workers. The Bloomfield senior is bound for a SUNY school next year to study business and accounting.

The Big M, he said, is a place “where everyone knows everyone else. I knew people who had this job before me.”

When part-timers like Bettini leave, they typically don’t leave the Delfs high and dry.
“They find their own replacements,” said Donna Delf.

“I was looking for a job,” remembered Rachel Repard of how she got to be a Big M worker, when two friends pulled her aside at school. “They’re like, ‘You should come work here; it’s fun.’”